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Monday, May 29, 2017

A recent hit piece on Psi Research

As you are aware Parapsychologist Daryl Bem has been doing a lot of experiments on ESP. Columnist Daniel Engber did a recent hit job on Parapsychology. He viciously attacked his character as a scientist by saying that Daryl Bem always believe in Psi. Couldn't be further from the truth. Daryl Bem is open to the possibility that maybe just maybe it exists. Numerous positive replications have been done by Daryl Bem and his colleagues. There has been some failures as well. Psi researchers are well aware the the experimenter effect which has been well known since the 1960's by psychologists. Apparently Daryl Bem, Marilyn Schlitz and Delorme presented results from their ESP experiment as they performed a pre registered analysis according to Daniel Engber. It looks like their large-scale, multisite, pre-registered replication ended in a failure. Here is a little more information cited from that article.

"In their conference abstract, though, Bem and his co-authors found a way to wring some droplets of confirmation from the data. After adding in a set of new statistical tests, ex post facto, they concluded that the evidence for ESP was indeed “highly significant.” Since then they’ve pre-registered a pair of follow-up experiments to test this new approach. Both of those efforts are in progress; meanwhile, the original attempt has not yet been published in a journal."

- Interesting but not so much, a typical accusation launched at Parapsychologist's is that they engage in fishing for positive results.

Not surprisingly Dr. Steven Novella did a recent post on this very subject. He said that Psi is dead. That their is no need for any more research in this field. The thing is which Steven Novella hides from his post is the fact their has been many successful positive replications for Psi. You can't take one negative result and have it rule out 2 or more positive results. It doesn't work that way. The reality is there has been more successful positive replications for Psi then their has been negative replications. Psi Phenomenon deserve to been taken seriously by the scientific community.

Steven Novella said this. Which I find rather interesting.

Alas, Bem and his fellow psi researchers did not give up:

In their conference abstract, though, Bem and his co-authors found a way to wring some droplets of confirmation from the data. After adding in a set of new statistical tests, ex post facto, they concluded that the evidence for ESP was indeed “highly significant.”

So close. They did the rigorous protocol, they put their nickle down like good scientists, but then they flinched from the results. That is the moment that separates real scientists from pseudoscientists. That is the ultimate test – can you accept results which definitively disprove your pet hypothesis?

So one failed replication disproves a person's theory?. I don't think so. For a phenomenon to be accepted it should be replicated hundreds of times.

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00146/full

Here is the Skeptical article on the Psi research done by Daryl Bem and others